Try to strike the right balance between providing too much and too little description/detail by asking yourself the following two sets of questions: We get it! You’re expressing your own opinions and concerns! That’s just me, though - my own feelings about it.” Others may think differently about the matter, but I couldn’t handle it. Honestly, for me, it’s just not something I’d be comfortable pursuing. Speaking for myself, it’s not in my nature. “Personally, I’d never be able to do that. The dark brown, overly ripe banana - formerly yellow but now brown and soft - was too soft to eat.”Ĭ. Ripe bananas are a yellowish-green but this one was dark brown. It was ripe a few days ago, but it wasn’t ripe now. It was dark in colour and soft to the touch. He was not yet old, for he was born only four years ago.”ī. He was 48 months old, which is 12 months more than 36 and one year more than three. He didn’t have any adult friends because he was not yet an adult. Because he was a child, he played with other children. As a four-year-old kid, he was not yet an adult. However, excessive description is sometimes sufficiently obvious to warrant little, if any, disagreement about its presence and effect.Ī. It refers to text featuring an unnecessary amount (an overabundance) of description.Īdmittedly, ‘too little’ versus ‘too much’ description is often a subjective rather than objective matter.
This first example of redundancy is one with which virtually all of us are likely familiar. Exceptions can be found to some of the examples provided below and so I encourage you to understand what follows less as rigid parameters that must be obeyed at all times and more as general guidelines that will keep you on the right path in the vast majority of cases.Sometimes, debates over whether a piece of text is redundant are more a reflection of differences in taste or style than of hard-and-fast rules pertaining to sentence structure and the like.It suggests an amateur quality to your writing, which threatens to leave a bad taste in your reader’s mouth, so to speak.īelow are three common types of redundant writing coupled with some practical tips for avoiding each of them in your own prose.īefore we begin, let me state two small caveats:.It often contradicts or otherwise undermines what you’re trying to do with your writing (e.g., establish a specific claim or explore a particular idea).It tends to interrupt the flow of your prose, causing your reader to become distracted and annoyed.Redundant writing is to be avoided for (at least) three reasons:
If you find yourself thinking, “alright, I get it already!” or “get on it with it, would you?” as you read something then you’re probably in the presence of redundant writing. In the context of writing, redundancy characterizes text that, in one way or another, presents more than what is needed to achieve the objective(s) of the writing. In general, ‘ redundancy’ refers to a quality of superfluousness, of that which is unnecessary and, often, excessively repetitive. Redundancy not only makes your writing tiresome to read but it also tends to undermine the very points you’re trying to establish.
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